Re: AWT

[Bryce McKinlay <bryce@albatross.co.nz>]

Lincoln Spiteri wrote:

> I think another possibility would be to get the minimum AWT required to run
> Swing apps. I belive that these need very little peer widgets.

Unfortunatly the "minimum required to run Swing apps" is actually about 80% of
the effort required to implement AWT. The implementation of the few native widget
peers is fairly trivial compared to all the graphics primitives, image classes,
layout management, event dispatch, etc - all of which are required by swing.

That said, I can not see any major obsticles to implementing AWT for gcj using
GTK+ or some similar toolkit. It should actually be much easier than it is for
CLASSPATH etc, thanks to CNI.

> Would using
>   Swing have any license implications?
>

Distributing gcj-compiled versions of Swing would probibly not be allowed, but if
gcj gets a good enough interpreter/JIT then that may not even matter. However,
IMO, gcj gives us the potential to write better, more portable _native_
applications, thanks to the tighter, cleaner, faster native-code integration that
CNI delivers. Just using gcj to run swing apps is missing the point, sort of.

regards

  [ bryce ]